The chance of another Tunguska-size impact somewhere on Earth this century is about 30%. That isn’t the likelihood that you will be killed by an asteroid, but rather the odds that you will read a news headline about an asteroid impact of this size somewhere on Earth. Unfortunately, that headline could be about the destruction of a city, as opposed to an unpopulated region of Siberia.
The chance in your lifetime of an even bigger asteroid impact on Earth—with explosive energy of 100 megatons of TNT—is about 1%. Such an impact would deliver many times the explosive energy of all the munitions used in World War II, including the atomic bombs. This risk to humanity is similar to an individual’s odds of dying in a car accident. That risk is small, but would you drive a car without air bags and seat belts? The question is apt because our society is effectively doing so with regard to the risk of a devastating asteroid strike.
I’ve been concerned about this for years (actually decades, ever since Alvarez first came up with his dinosaur theory, which seems to have been recently confirmed).
…boys are basically being graded on their behavior, not their merit. They have different styles of doing homework and don’t sit still in class. Teachers often hate this and reward girls for their conformity to their rules and penalize boys for their non-conformity and behavior. Teachers can no longer discipline in school, and the only punishment is often suspension. I wonder how the lack of discipline has played a role in teacher’s using grading, perhaps subconsciously to punish boys.
Sending kids to public schools is more and more becoming bad parenting.
There is no magic bullet that can magically transform the EU economy. The French made a mistake electing a socialist in France that decided to expand government programs and increase taxes. But no one ever confused the French for being capitalists. The multiplier effect of government spending is 0. You cannot tax and spend your way to economic prosperity.
No one tell the Democrats. Of course, it doesn’t matter. They won’t listen. It’s not in their political interest to do so (or at least that’s what they think).
Their convictions are sincere, the product of each man’s upbringing and early life experience. Mr. Obama’s formative years spent as a community organizer inspired him to consider the poor or unemployed as abused by businesses that shuttered plants or raised rents – victims of an indifferent society. His decision to “organize black folks” as he explains in “Dreams from My Father,” was fed by a need to find his place in the civil rights movement, to prove himself “not alone in my particular struggles.”
Those struggles include uneasiness with being black. When in Kenya, he finally experiences the “freedom that comes from not feeling watched…here the world was black, and so you…could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal.” His views of the United States and of Europe are tinged by antipathy to white colonialism. During his visit to Kenya he decides the white tourists are “an encroachment”; he resents that they exhibit “a confidence reserved for those born into imperial cultures.” Obama carries baggage.
Rubio grew up listening to his polio-stricken grandfather extol the virtues and values of the United States. Rubio recalls that like so many proud immigrants, the old man impressed upon his grandson that “there was no limit to how far I could go, because I was an American.” While Obama’s upbringing causes him to focus on America’s “darker periods,” Rubio’s relationship with his native land is celebratory. Early in his presidency, Mr. Obama declines to proclaim America’s exceptionalism while Rubio shouts it from the rooftops.
Yes, leftists, it really does reduce employment, among people who need the jobs the most and particularly for black youths. The notion that there should be a federal minimum wage at all, one-size-fits all, in a nation with dramatically different levels of cost of living, is economically insane.
Thoughts on the economic unreality of the political class:
There is for instance the wonderful idea that we can’t get out of this hole by cutting expenditures. REALLY? REALLY? So, let me see, if my family is spending 2000 a month, while making 1500, cutting expenditures is not the way to go. We shouldn’t examine our food budget, cut back on entertainment or perhaps move to a smaller place. No way no how, because cutting is not how you get out of a financial hole. No, golly-me. We’re supposed to get a student loan and take a course in something the government assures us will pay off. AND we’re supposed to go out to eat more. And move to a bigger place. And buy a newer car. And then we’ll be…
What? I don’t know. And neither do these people, because they’ve never balanced a checkbook.
The Aristos don’t have to balance anything. There’s always someone willing to finance them while using them as stalking horses. After all they talk so purty, and they say all the right things – the things that will allow those using them to get a greater grasp on power over the lives of everyone else.
Or take the minimum wage nonsense. What kind of insane idiot, with the crisis of unemployment we have would want to RAISE minimum wage? I mean, both the man reading these words off the teleprompter and the idiots who wrote them for him to read have presumably enough intelligence to stand upright and speak at the same time. So it shouldn’t be possible for them to NOT understand that a wage is something paid in exchange for a service. It is therefore tied to the value of that service. The idea of legislating it at ALL is insane, and leads to people who can’t afford to pay it hiring illegals or simply not growing their business past the one man stage – because, children, economics is a science. You can’t simply legislate wages, any more than you can legislate rain. BUT on top of that the idea of in a recession wanting to tie the minimum wage to the cost of living is so astonishingly stupid that– That I run out of words.
Fortunately, it’s just a figure of speech. She has a lot more words.
Obama called for the federal government to “redesign high schools.” Does he not know that schools are creatures of local and state, not the federal, governments? Does he care? Does he see no limits at all on the things that should occupy a president’s time?
And again, on what basis does the president who cannot even submit a budget make the claim that he is qualified to redesign high schools?
It’s all absurd. Barack Obama is the absurd president. He makes no attempt to make any sense, yet the media will pretend that he is a visionary.
The reality is, Barack Obama is just a very powerful crank.
Far too powerful. Far more powerful than the Founders ever intended.
Ordinarily a politician whose rhetoric diverges so far from the reality of his record would be run out of town, but with this president it is different. After four years of mediocre leadership, the majority of Americans continue to judge Barack Obama not on what he has done but on who he is. In an ironic reversal of the criteria of judgment set forth by Martin Luther King, they judge him not on the content of his character (or more precisely his actions and achievements) but on the color of his skin. The president is therefore exempt from the penalties other democratically elected leaders pay when they offend too egregiously against the truth; unlike them, he can stray into the realm of fantasy with impunity.
Not just with impunity, but he’s actually applauded for it.